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Often after a trauma
there is the mundane reveryif I could only
mine was a dream of an unbearable tartness
in a drink of volcanic coldness
I sipped metallic hospital crushed ice water
tried not to vomit up the simplest of soups

normally there is the gift of not desiring
the smell of nausea clings to things
that can’t be kept down but

I conjured up something like limeade
as a nuclear bomb is something like a firecracker
while the tubes of lukewarm glucose, morphine
and hot piss kept me alive.

Without preamble
as to why I haven’t been doing it
I begin to wonder if I can walk again.
The details come back to me in retrospect:
an accident, perhaps a wheelchair,
perhaps an eternal afternoon on a couch.

But I can stand,
I reason to myself, and
the memory is equally clear
standing up to shave, or speak.
The mundane reality of the afterworld,
of life after the thing that happened.

When I was in the hospital I dreamed simply
of walking, waking to find myself on fire
with pain, tied down with tubes.

I wake needing to urinate.
I stumble to the bathroom
before realizing the mundane reality.

in my dreams I was always walking somewhere
half-aware even in my dreams
I wasn’t walking anywhere
not for the time
being I’d had an accident in one
I stood behind a man speaking
on a podium he was leaning back
against me a heavy
weight a marching band advancing
everyone on their feet a
strange rhythm made musical
by repetition
muffled drums and low brass.

I half-woke hearing the solenoids of
some hospital bedside machine
clacking the music I’d heard.